This invention relates to a cable granulator for the separating the constituent parts of many types of electrical cable into very small, compact, comminuted and separated material suitable for recycling. An enormous amount of electrical cable is disposed of as scrap each year. This amount of cable contains vast quantities of valuable copper wire, which is nevertheless often thrown away because of the cost of separating the copper from plastic sheathing within which it is encased, and from armoring and insulating materials formed around the copper wire and plastic sheathing.
Armored cable is particularly difficult to recycle, since by definition the armoring makes it much more difficult to get to the copper wire. Armored cable is generally formed of a bundle of plastic-sheathed copper wires wrapped by side-by-side spiral wrappings of heavy steel wire, which are then covered with a thick rubber or plastic dielectric outer coating.
Separation of the materials is not the only problem encountered in recycling this type of material. The materials must also be in very small pieces so that little air space is left in the mass of separated material. This permits a large amount of copper to be contained in a relatively small volume container, in order to be able to ship the material economically. Thus the term "granulator" has been selected as describing the function of the apparatus in reducing the pieces of material to very small size on the order of 3 mm. Uniformity of size is enhanced by requiring the cut pieces of cable to pass through a grill having 3 mm openings.
The granulator is compact, robust, simple to operate and easily adaptable to varying types of cable.